Holocaust Denial in the Syrian Media

The Editor of the Syrian Regime's daily, Teshreen, Muhammad Kheir Al-Wadi, wrote an article (January 31, 2000) in which he denies the Holocaust and accuses Zionism of being worse than Nazism. The article, titled "The Plague of the Third Millenium", was published in the backdrop of the trial of Holocaust denier David Irving in England and the international conference on the Holocaust that was recently held in Stockholm.

"The Nazi war-machine annihilated more than 50 million lives, including Russians, Poles, French, Italians, and people of other nationalities. However, Zionism erased the blood of all those victims from the human [collective] memory and focused on the suffering of the Jews during the war. This, despite the fact that there is sound historical proof that Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis in order to escalate the Jewish Problem. Furthermore, some of them did not hesitate to commit murders and direct terror attacks [against Jews] in order to encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine. This, of course, in full cooperation with the German Nazi leaders..."

"Zionism hides the dark chapters of its black history. It invents stories regarding the Nazi Holocaust in which the Jews suffered and inflates them to astronomic proportions..."

"The problem is not in the Zionist ambition to forge history, but rather in the Zionist organizations' ambitions to revive their distorted version of history and use it to deceive international public opinion, win its empathy, and blackmail it..."

"Israel and the Zionist organizations strive for two goals: first, to be granted more funds from Germany and European states and institutions; second, they want to use the legend of the Holocaust as a sword hanging over the necks of all those who oppose Zionism who are accused of anti-Semitism..."[1]

"The countries of the world, that fiercely condemned the crimes of Nazism, [should] adamantly oppose the new Nazi Plague that breeds in Israel and whose poisons and dangers are being spread wherever it reaches..."

"This is a kind of ideological and physical terrorism that was known even in the darkest centuries in Europe. While history turned the page on the Nazi acts, the Zionist terrorist acts reached their peak. They committed massacres against innocent people and led a policy of aggression and expansion. This is the plague of the twentieth century that was passed to the third millennium and it spread destruction in every place it reached..."[2]

"The Zionists try to strangle any voice that reveals the truth... However, these voices [Holocaust deniers like Roger Garaudy and David Irving who were mentioned in the text] and other such voices have already left their marks on European public opinion and media who have started to raise questions that refresh the memory and establish the truth that was distorted by the Zionists..."

"This stream [of Holocaust deniers] has cast fear in the hearts of the Zionist movement that quickly convened a conference on the Holocaust in Stockholm in order to turn the Zionist lies into common knowledge..."

"The Zionist effort does not stop at paralyzing human memory, it also tries to shatter logic and distort reality. Israel, that presents itself as the heir of Holocaust victims, has committed and still commits much more terrible crimes than those committed by the Nazis. The Nazis did not expel a whole nation nor buried people and prisoners alive, as the Zionists did."[3]